In a typical hospital, nursing home, or other similar institution, doctors visit their patients on a routine basis and prescribe various medications for each patient. In turn, patients may be placed on respective, patient-specific medication treatment plans that require that the patients take one or more doses of various medications daily. Some medications may require that they be administered only at certain times of the day (e.g., after meals) and/or at intervals of one or more hours each day. In addition, patients may request certain medications on an elective basis for complaints, such as head or body aches. These requests may be included with the doctor's medication request or prescription that the doctor sends to a pharmacy of the hospital for filling.
Medication requests or prescriptions received by the pharmacy are typically checked by a registered pharmacist and then entered into the pharmacy information system (PIS). These requests may reflect not only orders that are added to a particular patient's treatment plan, but also changes in a patient's existing treatment plan. The pharmacy information system combines this information with the patient's existing medication schedule and develops a patient medication profile. Using the patient medication profile, a fill list can be created that lists all medications that must be distributed to all patients for a given time period (e.g., a day).
In some instances, this list is printed and used by a pharmacist or pharmacy technician to hand pick each of the drugs needed for each patient (in the form of unit doses) and place those drugs in corresponding patient-specific medication receptacles (e.g., boxes, bins or bags), which may be labeled to identify the patient and drugs contained therein. A registered pharmacist then checks the accuracy of the patient order, and, assuming the order was accurate, the individual patient boxes are loaded into a large transport cart and delivered to a nursing unit.
As an alternative to the aforementioned manual pick process, a number of pharmacies utilize automated systems for dispensing and restocking inventory. However, not all pharmacies can afford or in some cases need such an automated system. These pharmacies instead rely on paper order forms and handwritten logs to order, deliver medications and keep inventory records. This is time consuming, inaccurate and lacks to the ability to electronically store, retrieve and analyze these activities. One operation that even automated pharmacies continue to compromise in this way is the aforementioned pharmacist checking process. Upon being checked by a pharmacist, reports and/or patient labels may be merely initialed by the pharmacist. Exceptions or other deviations from the reports and/or labels are seldom recorded, and reports and labels may be lost with time.